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Scientists Question Laws of Nature
mknewman writes "MSNBC is reporting that scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants' including the speed of light, alpha (the fine structure constant of the magnetic force), the ratio of proton to electron mass and several others. These findings were made by observing quasars and comparing the results to tests here on the earth." From the article: "Time-varying constants of nature violate Einstein's equivalence principle, which says that any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed. If this principle is broken, then two objects dropped in a gravitational field should fall at slightly different rates. Moreover, Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says."
Do you mean philote, or am I just missing something? Either way, physicists might object to your use of the word "we." :)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Apart from the time scale involved, this isn't all that new. Scientific American had an article on this over a year ago.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Just to point out,
There is no such thing as "Ohm's Law", in the sense of a "Law".
It's just a rough estimate to Maxwell's Equations under certain conditions.
Which, themselves are rough estimates to behaviors described by Quantum Mechanics.
Sigs are for the weak.
Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says.
First of all, let me preface this by saying IAAP (I am a physicist):
All this talk of laws being "wrong" or no longer "correct" is just popular fluff the press either hypes or makes up.
No physical law is ever completely correct. A physical law is simply a description of reality to the degree to which we understand it, and is "correct" (i.e. produces predicitions which fit our measurements) within the realm of our present experience of the phenomenon it describes. As our understanding and experience of a phenomenon grows to encompass a wider range of circumstances (e.g. scale, velocity), the law needs to be either refined or replaced with new law, possibly based upon a new paradigm.
Newton's laws of motion are no less "correct" now than they ever were. Einstein determined that the realm in which they accurately described reality did not include large velocities near the speed of light (i.e. >0.1c). Quantum mechanics explained how at small scales these same rules no longer applied. Even today, no one yet knows how to reconcile the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics when their realms overlap--this is still pioneering work.
Yet Newton's laws are still taught as the foundation of physics to all new students because they are still valid within the realm or experience in which all of our normal lives are conducted. Models, and the laws derived with them, are valid only within the realm of experience within which they were formed (and, if the inventer is lucky, they hold even beyond that). And they remain valid within that realm even when we find later than they don't hold outside that realm. Even Aristotle's belief that heavier objects fall faster than light objects is valid to a point (within a realm where air friction is a significant contributor), even though Galileo later "proved" this was wrong (i.e. it is not a general law).
It's not so much "incorrect" as "impossible to test" or "irrelevant", because gravity is 17 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces which dominate at the atomic and subatomic scales.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Only at pretty low redshift, though. At any redshift appreciably close to or greater than 1, there really isn't much meaning to "distance" --- would you interpret that distance to be at the time of emission, the time of detection, or somewhere in between? We basically just use the cosmological redshift, which says that the redshift z represents how much the universe has expanded since the radiation was emitted. That's it. Any "distance" or lookback time is model-dependent. Instead of measuring slight deviations in universal constants, they are perhaps measuring perturbations in a particular cosmological model.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
Right --- I'm just picking nits, since I've seen lots of confusion by others in similar reports.
in the post text you read:
"scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants'"
in the article the sentence says:
"Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past."
whats the use if people cant tell the difference between MAY and ARE?
there is a big difference between "you MAY die this week" and "you ARE to die this week"
i know, its all relative, and i know what they meant... but you know what? thats not true. i opened this because i thought the may actually turned to an are... a possibliity realized. when i get there, its still may, and people cant even read basically.
Let's also not forget that Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics! He won his Nobel Prize for work on the photoelectric effect, which helped prove that light was quantized, not for anything he did with Relativity. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...